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For the fifth straight year, the Sundance Music and Sound Design Lab has returned to Skywalker Sound.  This lab provides a group of six emerging Composers with valuable firsthand experience composing for film.  Each Composer will be paired with a Filmmaker with a project in post-production.  These Filmmaker/Composer teams will work closely with in-house Sound Designers and Re-recording Mixers to integrate all aspects of sound for film.

 

Click here for the complete list of Composers and Filmmakers.  They will be joined by Skywalker Sound’s Dave Acord, Bob Edwards, Malcolm Fife, Dennis Leonard, Kent Sparling, and Bonnie Wild.

 

With leading Film Composers, Directors, Music Editors, and Music Supervisors serving as Creative Advisors, Lab Fellows work closely together in a supportive atmosphere designed to promote experimentation and collaboration.

Skywalker Sound was awarded with two Golden Reel Awards on Sunday night.  Moana won in the category of Feature Film, Animation and The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and the Silk Road Ensemble won in the category of Feature Film, Documentary:

 

Best Sound & Music Editing: Feature Film; Animation
Moana
Supervising Sound Editor: Tim Nielsen
Supervising Dialogue Editor: Jacob Riehle
Foley Editors: Thom Brennan, Matthew Harrison
Music Editors: Earl Ghaffari, Dan Pinder
Temp Music Editors: Dominick Certo, Tommy Holmes
Sound Effects Editors: Jonathan Borland, Pascal Garneau, Lee Gilmore
Foley Artists: John Roesch, Shelley Roden

 

Best Sound & Music Editing: Feature Film; Documentaries
The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble
Supervising Sound Editor: Pete Horner
Sound Designer: Al Nelson
Sound Effects Editor: Andre Zweers

 

Congratulations to all for such incredible work!

Skywalker Sound was awarded Saturday night with two Cinema Audio Society Awards for Outstanding Achievement in Sound Mixing.  Nathan Nance, Michael Semanick, and Scott Curtis won for Finding Dory in the category of Motion Picture – Animated.  Pete Horner won for The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble in the category of Motion Picture – Documentary.

 

Congratulations to Nathan, Michael, Scott, and Pete!

 

A complete list of nominees and winners can be found here.

The Cinema Audio Society announced nominees for the 53rd CAS Awards and Skywalker Sound projects were honored with eight nominations across multiple categories.

 

In the category of Motion Picture – Live Action, Tom Johnson, Juan Peralta, and Scott Curtis were nominated for Doctor Strange and Chris Scarabosio, David Parker, and Frank Rinella were nominated for Rogue One: A Star Wars Story.

 

Skywalker projects nabbed four out of the five nominations in the Motion Picture – Animated category with Finding Dory (Nathan Nance, Michael Semanick, and Scott Curtis), Moana (Scott Curtis), The Secret Life of Pets (Gary Rizzo, David Acord, and Jason Butler), and Zootopia (Scott Curtis).

 

In the category of Motion Picture – Documentary, Pete Horner was nominated for his work on The Music of Strangers: Yo-Yo Ma and The Silk Road Ensemble.

 

And in the category of Television Non-Fiction, Variety or Music Series or Specials, Chris Barnett, Roy Waldspurger, and Jason Butler were nominated for “Mars: Novo Mundo”.

 

Click here for a complete list of nominations. The Awards will be presented February 18 at the OMNI Hotel, Los Angeles.

With a growing number of people consuming content on televisions, laptops, tablets and other mobile devices, Skywalker has been particularly interested in finding technology that helps preserve an immersive audience experience as content migrates to smaller screens.   The format that is the most widely distributed around the world for consumption on these devices is the stereo mix, but with a regular stereo mix much of the sonic detail and spatialization is lost.

 

But thanks to a new technology created by tech start-up Ambidio and utilized by Skywalker Sound, devices that could previously offer only a simple stereo mix can now deliver the impression of a surround sound experience.

 

The enhanced mixes of the scenes below were created by Skywalker Sound using Ambidio’s proprietary algorithm, which allows any device with two speakers to reproduce the impression of the original surround sound mix.  And because the Ambidio algorithm is encoded in the content when the stereo mix is mastered, users don’t need to download any apps or have any special playback system to experience it — they just hit play on their device as they normally would.

 

(Please note that this works best with two forward-facing external speakers; the effect won’t be discernible on single-speaker devices.)